Role: Sole Developer
Year: January 2024
Engine: Unity
Platform: Desktop
Target Audience: Strategy crowd, with time would be ported to mobile audience.
Available at: Link temporarily down.

Description:

This project was for GGJ24 and the theme was Make Me Laugh. I really didn’t like this theme, and just could not think of a baseline game to accomplish that task. So I looked at the diversifiers and there was one in there from Transfuzer for baked beans to be included in the game. I liked that one and thought I could make a game wholly dedicated to beans. I did also hit one of the other diversifiers called Lunchtime Challenge which was a game that only needed one hand to play.

What did I do:

• I decided to make this one as a tug of war strategy game
• The objective was to fight the runner bean army and recruit troops
• The recruited troops were naked beans
• So I had to do a lot of programming for this one since each troop type needed to react and act differently.
• There is 4 different behaviours; collect, fight, heal, explode.
• I ran out of time so didn’t get to do audio, and instead focused on adding some art.
  
  

Challenges:

Time, time was a constant challenge on this project, largely because I joined the jam late and had opted to create a project which grew bigger than the initial scope I planned for.
My target audience was the old school free arcade strategy gamer crowd who played things like stickmen games. I figured it would have 4 characters, each with a different behaviour to enable forward momentum of the game. The creation of behaviours that were unique to each character ended up being where I spent the most time and perhaps I should have cut it down to 3 and focused on those and making them amazing instead of passable.
I did spent most of the time on the behaviour trees, this did however mean that the game lacks animations and sound as they were prioritised lower than programming and design.
My dissertation which was running concurrently to this project was all about behaviour trees and autonomous behaviour so I thought even for a jam I could use this project to further assist me in gaining knowledge for that project as it was also growing larger.
I was mostly there with this game and the bug fixing, there is still one bug, in that if the fighters target the same bean and both of them kill it within the same few frames then the later hitter will retarget the next bean and deliver the damage to that one instead. I can fix this but not within the timeframe, just by putting a check on the current target and whether they are within hitting range. Or by putting a checker on there to see if the one they are attacking is the previous target and not the current target. At worst this would be a day one patch as it is a very basic iteration.
Overall I like the style, enjoyed the theme, and just wish I joined the jam earlier and spent more time on it to make it more of a minimum viable product.